


Secrets & Lies

by woollen_pharaohs



Series: Continuations of beautiful indie films [3]
Category: Lady Bird (2017)
Genre: Emotional Abuse, F/F, can't believe this fic doesn't already exist, the sequel i wish was real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 05:28:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13710825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woollen_pharaohs/pseuds/woollen_pharaohs
Summary: An exploration of Lady Bird's sexuality and her preoccupation with secrets and lies.





	Secrets & Lies

**Author's Note:**

> Lady Bird is a beautiful, complete film, but i felt that my interpretation of Lady Bird's narrative didn't have an ending and was rather a beginning to sexual realisation and lesbianism. In this fic, I wanted to continue her story and draw on aspects that were left behind (Julie, the consequence of an ambulance bill, Lady Bird always _seeking_ , Danny's possible bisexuality etc.) and build an alternative ending that i was more content with for how i interpreted the film.

**i.**

The day after Kyle deflowered her, Lady Bird decided to try the showerhead. It was pretty intense, like Julie had said, and it felt nothing like a dick, like she had said to Julie. Lady Bird thought she might have liked it better.

 

**ii.**

There were so many people in New York. So many eyes and legs and coats and bags and trolleys and cars honking and cyclists zipping by. Didn’t they know that they were being watched?

Christ, sometimes Lady Bird sounded like Kyle.

 

**iii.**

She’d called her mother to tell her she loved her and she’d had to snatch out her notepad and scrawl down the price of the ambulance to her growing list of debts. Part of her thought that one day she would live in a nice house and work a job she loved and pay back what her life amounted to, and part of her hated that her mother was right and that she’ll never be anything but the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

 

**iv.**

She used to see Danny at the grocery shop every Saturday with his Mom and siblings. Lady Bird always wished she could do something nice for him like give him the family discount, not that he needed it. She thought the best thing she could ever do for him was keep his secret even after she moved interstate.

Lady Bird thought about her first love from time to time. She thought for a long while that Danny had said that he respected her enough not to touch her boobs because he was a good Catholic boy and good Catholic boys are respectful and nice and kiss you when they’re happy and when they love you too. She also thought, for a while, that she had been cruelly lied to but it wasn’t a cruel lie, it was a white lie, she finally decided. It was a half truth and a half lie and the rest of it was that Danny didn’t mind kissing girls or boys. He just liked kissing people.

Of course, that didn’t deny the fact that he cheated on her because that pain was real. She remembered leaning the chairs back in Julie’s Mom’s car and staring up at the stains in the fabric covering the ceiling and holding Julie’s hand the whole time as they cried together. Lady Bird never liked being lied to and Kyle was the second boy who lied to her when he said that he was a virgin when he had actually slept with five or six people ‘maybe’.

Christine thought about all this for a long time and it took her a while but she came to a conclusion that there was a difference between the lies she grew up on. Mom lied about Dad being on anti-depressants because she didn’t want to make Lady Bird sad that Dad was sad. Just like Danny didn’t want to tell Lady Bird who he was and what he liked because he was trying to protect himself _and_ her. He was scared to tell her that he didn’t want to have sex because he was scared that he wouldn’t want to, and that that rejection would make her feel sad and bad and unloved and unwanted. And she _had_ felt sad and bad, but she hadn't felt unloved and unwanted because she knew Danny loved her like she loved Julie. It was Kyle who had made her feel sad and bad and unloved and unwanted because he lied maliciously to get something out of her. There was no protection about it except the plastic around his dick.

The thing Christine slowly began to realise was that she liked kissing people too. She liked kissing Danny even after he came out because she was bursting with adoration and pride and Danny was her friend who she loved. Lady Bird liked kissing Kyle because he had been very good at it but she doesn’t think she ever loved him or even liked him, really. She liked kissing Julie, too, because she loved her a lot but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have sex with her, and she supposed she never had to lie to Julie because Julie never asked her to have sex.

The problem Lady Bird was having was that everyone kept lying to her saying that they were doing it to protect her and she didn’t like that. She didn’t like people even _thinking_ she needed protecting because she’s as strong willed as her mother, she never needed protection and she can make it on her own. Maybe that meant she had to lie more because it wasn’t the whole truth. Or maybe she lied all the time because facing her own truth is scary and it _hurts_.

Christine knew that it hurt because the brutal, unpolished truth was all she’s ever heard her entire life about how she’ll never live in a nice house and how she’ll never have a good job and how she’ll never have happiness even when she’s successful. As if God’s plan had decreed that she would live in gruelling depression from birth to death, and her mother was there sweeping a straw broom at her feet keeping her in line.

 

**v.**

She was alone in New York for a long time. No one understood her or understood why she loved Sacramento, and she understood why Father Leviatch had said to Julie that the audience didn’t understand the school play. People listened to stories and they took it at face value. Not many people really dug down to the deeper truths in the things Lady Bird said and she wasn’t sure if it was because they didn’t want to or they didn’t know that they could. That there was more to her than what could be gleaned from the surface.

The lies she told helped her control the narrative she wished she had. Let people believe whether she was from Sacramento or San Francisco or São Paulo. She supposed her mother was right about Spanish being useful. She met a Spanish boy and dry humped him because she liked dry humping better. And then she got tired of men getting tired of her and she wondered what it would be like for someone to tap _her_ on her shoulder and shake her hand and say that they liked the way she looked and that they should go and get Chinese together sometime. She wondered what it would be like to be found, to be ogled without knowing it or inviting it.

Halfway through the year she yelled at her professor and it might have meant she could have faced academic suspension if she hadn’t written an essay in apology but she wasn’t truly sorry about any of it because it meant someone paid attention to her. She invited her around to her little box of a room and they sat on the window sill and their breath stained the glass when they kissed and she found she quite liked that too.

 

**vi.**

The church in the city was like the one on the better side of the tracks; tall ceilings and stained glass windows that got cleaned every month and real marble on the floor and there was barely any ash on the ceiling from the candles they lit every day.

One day, Christine was sitting on a hard wooden pew in a time in her life when she was feeling particularly lost and sad and lied to and she was watching some men in white clean the ash and cobwebs and cover up the cracks. They hung from the ceiling from very tall ladders and looked like spiders cleaning up their own mess.

Lady Bird never took chapel too seriously but she found comfort in the cold, hard church and sat listening to the choir feeling oddly at peace even though she knew that the small shred of faith she held onto was dwindling the longer she was away from her mother and her old high school and the Jesus loving nuns.

 

**vii.**

It was hard to shake the feeling that everything had to be useful. Well, it was useful to drink ‘til she dropped or fuck boys who pushed in and out and came and left without even appreciating the show she put on about admiring them and making them feel good. Maybe she wanted to feel good. Maybe she wanted to feel free to make her own decisions or spend frivolously on a bag of doritos or a nice cardigan or do things that she wanted to do not because they would help her pay debts but because they would make her happy. Maybe she was interested in gay women because they understood the importance of choice.

 

**viii.**

She lived in a matchbox of an apartment for years. The window was her favourite feature but the city was so bright and polluted that she couldn’t see Bruce anymore no matter how much she told him how much she loved him.

They all shared one toilet on the one floor. It was very French, Danny had told her. But she got a UTI and her girlfriend insisted that she didn’t need to go to the clinic but she had to be sure even though she hadn’t had sex with a man since she left Sacramento. She held hands in the foyer, and was told, soothingly, ‘It’s fine, it’s just a yeast infection. All women get them.’ But she’d been rattled by the ferocity in the screaming Catholics outside when all she was there for was to make sure she truly wasn’t pregnant. It was scary, but not scary enough to call her mom about it.

 

**viii.**

Christine liked her mom better the longer she didn’t have to live with her. The physical distance between them was healing, but she never liked the emotional distance one bit.

All she wanted was her mother to _like_ her, for who she was, whether it was the best version of herself or not. Couldn’t her mother have compassion for her when she made mistakes? Of which she made many when she left home…

She drank too much and bought too much and ate food she had never tried before, and she only bought second hand clothes but the clothes were more plentiful and pricier than in Sacramento and she knew she was a walking purse with a hole in it. She got two jobs. Studied. Worked summers and winters and paid for classes that the financial aid didn’t cover and paid for rent too. And over time she found herself thinking like her mother. She began to see the price tags on every single thing in the world. Her math was still bad, and everything seemed more expensive than she could afford and it was crushing but she never felt hopeless no matter how hard the truth tried to tear her apart.

She was raised a realist but somehow, she never lost hope.

Christine was determined that she was going to graduate and get a good paying job and pay back her family. And her mother was going to find something to like about her. Just one small thing about her, anything, even if she didn’t like a single other thing about the person Christine grew into. She was strong willed and dedicated, like her mother, and lord, Christine found it infuriating how similar they were. She thought she had barely anything of her Dad’s because she didn’t have his mathematical mind and she wasn’t terribly depressive and lucky she wasn’t or she’d likely have several disorders with a mother like her own.

Danny had told her that he thought her mother was scary and Lady Bird had parroted something that Shelly had said, that her mother was actually very warm and that Danny must be wrong because no person could be warm and scary at the same time. But as Christine read more and talked to more people and learned more about the world and different people and ways of living, she began to realise that her mother _was_ scary. Christine found her mother scary not because of her brutal honesty but because of what she would do when she discovered the truths Lady Bird had kept from her mother, had lied about to cover and comfort and had held power in the secret Marion knew not yet how to judge.

And all that time and distance apart made Christine realise that Marion thought she knew the underlying truth of life, and that living it otherwise would not only endanger the individual but those around her. It took Christine a very long time to understand her mother’s point of view wasn’t all mothers’ points of view and that she was _allowed_ to function in life without caring about her mother’s judgement. Though she always did care.

Marion brought her to life and Christine could lover her mother but she understood after some time that fundamentally she did not _like_ her mother. She liked and loved her Dad. She liked and loved Julie and Danny and the small handful of friends she made at college, who each reciprocated in ways that made her heart swell. She never liked Kyle that much and in the end Christine realised that she loved the idea of him, or what it meant for her to date a popular boy and fit in with his lifestyle even though he didn’t like her back one bit. She thought, perhaps, that mothers are the rare exception where love can exist without a sense of liking the parent’s or child’s personality and spirit as a human being, for a father is either all in or all out and luckily in Lady Bird’s case, her dad was warm and tender and tried his hardest to fill in the gaps that her mom carved into her.

 

**ix.**

Christine had asked Miguel one Christmas because as far as she saw, her adopted brother never got treated the way she had been. Their mother never brought up Miguel’s piercings and smoking and makeup and was it because he was a boy or adopted or why did he get pity when she didn’t even ask to be born. Miguel wasn’t flesh and blood like Lady Bird and yet their mother liked Miguel and even Shelly and somehow or another she couldn’t find it in her heart to like Lady Bird or Christine or the very daughter that she gave birth to.

At one point in Marion’s life she knew that she wanted to be a mother even though her own mother had been an abusive alcoholic. Christine didn’t know if she could be a mother if her mom was like her mother minus the alcoholism. She wondered if Marion excused her emotional abuse because she didn’t drink, and how she would feel if Christine stopped trying to talk to her and if she would feel guilty or sad if Christine never showed up for Thanksgiving or Christmas or what she would do if Christine never came home to Sacramento ever again. Would her dad post her a parcel of crumpled letters that her mother never had the heart to complete?

 

**x.**

On her breaks at the downtown coffee shop she would call Julie and Danny because the manager kindly or unknowingly covered the long distance calls. She’ll never forget the day Danny came to her at the back of her Sacramento coffee shop and cried on her shoulder or the night of Prom where she had sat down on Julie’s couch and her best friend had told her, ‘Some people aren’t meant to be happy’. Lady Bird thought that they were both wrong. She told them so all the time.

The first thing she fell in love with about Danny was the way that he smiled when he sang like he truly believed in the lyrics and the music and the story he was telling. And Julie? Julie was the happiest person she ever met. Julie sounded like a ray of sunshine even when she had tears gumming up her mouth because they just missed each other so much and the free call service at Christine’s work wasn’t ever long enough for the talks that needed to be had. But she loved talking to Julie because whenever the calls with her ended, she was left blanketed in a wash of warmth. As if Julie’s delight and love and warmth beamed out of her and travelled along the wires underground and above ground all the way to Christine’s New York coffee shop and powered a smile on her face too.

It made her feel flush and maybe Julie had always made her feel that way but Lady Bird had never done anything about it until her college girlfriend took her to a sex shop and bought her a vibrator.

 

**xi.**

Shelly had moved into Lady Bird’s old room and was paying rent even though she had broken up with Miguel. It meant Christine had to take the pull out couch and there wasn’t much privacy but she forfeited that right to the entire town when she brought home a girlfriend from New York.

It was Christine’s and Lady Bird’s biggest secret. One she kept from her mom and one Marion would never want to know but one she would eventually have to know. Maybe Christine wanted her to know, wanted Marion to make her judgement so that Christine could make peace with whatever her mother decided about her. Dumb. Narcissistic. Careless. Lesbian.

To this day she doesn’t know why she thought it would be a good idea to invite her first girlfriend to Sacramento. It was probably the first and the last time she would ever see the place. The only memories she would have to associate would be having sex with Christine McPherson on the pull out couch after an intense dinner Christine knew would not be her last so long as Christine found the right fit.

 

**xii.**

Julie invited her to her Dad’s every summer even though she knew Lady Bird couldn’t come. There was one summer where Julie hadn’t asked her, after a Christmas where Christine had brought a girl she really liked home to meet her mother, as if that wouldn’t make Marion dislike her any more than she already did. But her relationship was going really well with the Psychology major girl and she had told Julie so much about her so it really did hurt that Julie didn’t invite her to her Dad’s the following summer.

She really hated not being talked to. It took her a long time to find the right number to call but she eventually got onto Julie. It was hard to digest Julie’s truth because she was so far away and she couldn’t hear the warmth in Julie’s voice through the phone. That should have made what Julie was saying all the more real but the storm had sounded like a lie and the misunderstanding had sounded too good to be true. But Julie had reassured her that everything between them was fine and that she still loved her and supported her and was happy for her. And Christine had cried and cried because it was all she wanted to hear from the people she loved the most.

The next summer, Julie had invited Lady Bird again. It was the summer after graduation and she had been accepted into her Master’s program and she’d been seeing the Psychologist graduate for almost two years. For the first time, she went, just for two weeks. Her girlfriend came with her and she remembered all three of them sitting on the riverbank talking about a thesis Christine’s girlfriend was working on about the relationships between woman and their ex-husbands and the issues with childcare post-divorce.

Julie had a lot to talk about and Lady Bird had a lot to say about childcare when the parents _should_ have divorced, because though her parents said they loved each other, her dad didn’t like the way Marion treated Christine and her mom didn’t like the way her dad spoiled Lady Bird. And yet they loved each other and stayed together when they didn’t even like each other and Christine just couldn’t understand how they could do it. Why women and men did that to each other when life is so much better and fuller and true when liking and loving comes hand in hand.

 

**xiii.**

Maybe Christine hadn’t paid everything back but she sent money when she could and she was successful in her own right. Successful because she was happy and in love and liked her wife and loved her work. And she lived with her wife in a tiny apartment where they could see the stars if they closed their eyes and remembered the vacations they spent together in warm, crisp nights, where the celestial Bruce and his loving girlfriend, Lady Bird, twinkled dreamy smiles overhead, and bestowed them warmth that Christine found to be honest and true in every fibre of her being.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for any mistakes. Hope you liked it :)


End file.
